Yet Another Craftsman 113 Saw Blog #9: Still plodding along

Once again with weather and other commitments I haven’t made a lot of progress. Also the fact that I’ve been devoting the time I have worked on this on the router end has slowed me down. Over the last few weeks I got the opening for the router plate and the miter track cut out, got the router, plate, and track mounted. It didn’t take too long to get that done. The rest though has been chewing up much more time than I anticipated. Other than a large bottom drawer to hold routers, I didn’t really get very specific in what I was going to do either side of the enclosure for the router as I wasn’t certain exactly how much space I was going to need to accommodate the router hanging down. This weekend I managed to finish one side. Just one drawer, a slide out bit holder, and the chase for the electrical. You wouldn’t think it’d have taken me this long. I haven’t really worked with 1/2” plywood before, and have only built one drawer prior to this, and for some reason those two things combined to really confuse the crap out of me. At any rate, that side’s done now, and other than making one drawer shorter to allow for the dust collection, the other side should go faster.

As I’d planned, I used the switch that had come with the table saw for the router. The only problem with it is that it sticks out a little further than I’d like, but it doesn’t seem to be so much that it’ll be a problem.

The covering for the router cord was split pretty badly near where it entered the router. Also it was going to be a lot of unnecessary cord in the enclosure. Since the router’s being dedicated for table use only, I didn’t have a problem with shortening it up to be only a couple of feet long. Also removed the handles to save a little more space.

The chase for the electrical isn’t much. The screws coming through are from a couple of hangers on the front for me to hang the saw fence on when it’s not being used. I don’t think they’ll present a problem for the cords, but will probably still take them out and grind off the points just to be sure. When I got everything connected, I plugged a fan into the receptacle to test it out. Popped the breaker three times before I figured out the problem was that I had my white and black wires backwards on the switch. Got that fixed and it works perfectly.

Once I’m done with the drawers for the other side of the router enclosure and the one on the bottom this side will be done and I’ll start working on the downdraft table end. I already have everything worked out for that end so it should go much quicker. All I need is time… sigh